Memories of Shakertown

I have written several tales of my times at Shakertown at South Union. It was a wonderful time of my life, full of fun and work and few responsibilities.

Just what DO they wear...?
Ghosts of Shakers Past
Trouble at Shakertown
Cold Feet
The Twister

Just what do they wear...?

At South Union Shakertown each summer there was a 'pageant' held, depicting scenes from the Shaker's lives, and performing pieces of the Shaker music in mock services. These were performed in a huge tent behind the Center House - the main house, and where all the major services were held. Next door, in the East House, there was a monastery. The monks had purchased the House, and re-done the gardens and the interior of the house. It was a lovely, isolated, quiet place for meditation, except for the few weeks out of the year when the pageant was held. At that time, they would open the gardens to the tourists, and allow them to walk around the grounds and photograph the house's exterior. One of the monks loved to come and watch us rehearse. Brother Aaron was his name, I believe. He was a young man, probably not much older than most of us, say between 18 and 25 years old. He was always in his robe, even on the hottest of days, and we used to have long debates about just what it was exactly that he wore under those robes! Most of us were in shorts and t-shirts, or on the hottest days, sometimes the girls would wear swimsuit tops. Hardly modest. After a few weeks of this debate, I (being the most bold of the group) finally said, "Well, let's just ask him!". So I did. I went right up to him and said, "Brother Aaron, we've been wondering - what do you wear under those hot robes?" Brother Aaron smiled and said nothing, but started unhooking his robe. Several of the girls giggled and turned away (not me, needless to say! ;-> ) but Brother Aaron continued, turning away as he unhooked the last hook, and with a final flourish, spun around flinging his robes open like a flasher on the street! And there, under the robes he had on... shorts and a college logo t-shirt! We all just about fell down laughing. Brother Aaron laughed with us, and then laughed all the harder at us laughing at ourselves. After that, he was always there when we were there, and never missed a performance.

May 2,1996

Ghosts of Shakers Past

Some of the most fun times I ever had were the summers I worked at Shakertown (South Union, not the more famous Pleasant Hill. Both are in Kentucky, but South Union was only 45 minutes away from where I grew up.). We had a great feeling of family. Each summer we greeted each other with smiles and hugs, and soon it was as if we had never left. We loved that place. I'll always remember the opening night parties. It was a tradition that started the year I joined the cast. After 6 long, hard weeks of rehearsals, opening night was an exciting, nerve wracking evening, and afterwards we all spent the night on the grounds - usually in the performance tent - not that anyone much slept! That was a night of all out release. Those who wanted got slobbering drunk, or walked down to the river and rolled a few and got pleasantly stoned, or occasionally, there was the couple who sneaked off and amused the rest of us with their happy noises.(Shakertown is out in the middle of nowhere, and sounds carried much farther than most folks imagined!)

I think it was the third year I was there, all of us got very brave about 2:00 in the morning, and decided to go into the Center House and visit the local ghost. Supposedly this was the ghost of a Shaker woman who longed to have children of her own (sex was a serious no-no among the Shakers), and dreamed of having a husband and family. The tale goes that she felt so guilty about this perceived sin, that when she died, her ghost stayed behind in the Center House in the rooms that served as the nursery. Just imagine 12 - 15 drunk, slightly stoned, completely exhausted pageant players standing in a huddle outside a vacant 3 story museum at 2:00 in the morning in the pitch black (no street lights out there!), peering up at the third floor windows. What a sight we must have been! Then, one of the younger girls screamed, and pointed to the window of the nursery. There, in the dark, we could see - all of us - a pale figure in the window. A figure wearing what appeared to be Shaker dress. The more flighty of the group became bats out of hell, and flew down to the river, where they felt to be at a safe distance. The more stupid of the group (this includes yours truly) determined that if the ghost was there, then she knew we were there, too, and must want to see us. So, off we tramped to the third floor of the Center House. The museum curator was also in the show, and had the keys, so he let us in. The building was like a cavern. The only light was the dim starlight from the windows, barely enough to see by, and quiet like the grave. Or so we thought. We were climbing the servant's steps up the side of the building, and when we got to the third floor we all stopped, listening. What we heard nearly scared us to death. The floors were creaking down the hall, and two doors opened and closed - by themselves! At this point more of the group abandoned the search. The rest, holding hands, proceeded down the hallway, checking each room as we passed. None of us saw anything. That is, until we came to the nursery, where all of us saw that the rocker....was rocking, rocking, rocking....

It is a wonder none of us were killed in our terrified flight down three flights of painted concrete stairs, but we all arrived at the bottom unharmed. From that day on, for the rest of the season, all of us who had been brave (read stupid) enough to go to the third floor that night spoke to the ghost every time we entered the floor.

To this day I wonder what happened that night. I know for a fact that no corporeal human was in that building, because I was one of two people that walked thru at lock up time, the other being the curator. No one had keys to the building but him, and he was with us the whole time. This had been no planned excursion that someone decided to play a trick on. It was strictly spur of the moment. That summer, many of us who were "immortal" college kids, started to think that maybe, just maybe we should at least think about the future - maybe, just maybe we weren't as smart as we thought we were!

May 02 1995

Trouble at Shakertown

Trouble can sometimes bring folks closer. Take it from someone who almost died to prove the point.

Shakertown wasn't always wonderful. Whenever you get more than two people together for long periods of time, they're gonna get on each others nerves. Well, one year, the director, just call him "Sir", was doing a superb job of getting on everyone's nerves. We had just one week until opening night, and he decided that he was going to re-block the entire 'picnic scene' - a 15 minute scene involving much singing and (hopefully) coordinated movement. "You want to do WHAT?!" Was the general response. It had taken us every minute of available rehearsal time for 5 weeks to get that scene together, and now we were supposed to start over and get it right in ONE WEEK? This predictably led to much squabbling and whining, and the ever present threat of "I'll just quit - I'm not getting paid enough for this kind of ....", well, you can imagine. I was not immune to this angry streak developing in the cast, after all, I had a 4 minute solo piece which was going to have to be rearranged, and rechoreographed, and all - as far as we could see - for nothing. All Sir would say was, "It's just not right!"

After the (extra long) rehearsal that night, I was as hot as a firecracker. Mad as hell. My friend Jon was riding with me that night, and we were all too pissed off to even bother speaking on the way out. We got in my little red '72 Fiat, and I screamed out of the parking lot, too mad to pay much attention to anything more than the road directly ahead of me. I approached the 90 degree curve which skirted the railroad embankment at a decent 45 m.p.h. Too fast for that curve, but I'd done it before - no problem. As I began the turn, I felt that the car was not responding properly, and before I could react in any way, I felt the wheel jerk, out of control, in my hands. I yelled, "My God, Jon, we're gonna wreck!", and closed my eyes so as not to see the spectre of death coming upon me. I felt the car sliding off to the right, and Jon (on my right) slid away from me, and I heard a sickening THUMP as his body hit the passenger door. I lifted my legs, visions of crushed limbs in my head, turning the wheel to the left in a futile attempt to correct the skid, and slid to the right against Jon, still clutching the steering wheel. Then the world reversed itself. We were upside down, but only for a moment, and with a muffled crunch, crunch, bump, we stopped, right side up. I paused, and took a breath. Then I opened my eyes. Smoke was pouring out from under the hood, and some kind of fluid was dripping down the fenders. Panic! I looked for Jon, and saw him, dazed, but alive, staring at the smoke. "Jon, get the fuck out! It's gonna burn!" I grabbed my door handle to get out, and discovered that my door would not open. The car was mashed up against the 20 foot high embankment, with the road 20 feet above me! By this time Jon had gotten his door open and was out, so I climbed out over the seats into the 4 foot tall grass. There to meet me were most of the cast members! I had been one of the first ones out, being parked in the front of the lot, and they had all seen the accident. One had gone back to call 911. They helped Jon and me up the steep slope, and we surveyed the situation. We determined that the smoke was actually steam, and the fluid was radiator fluid so there was no immediate danger of fire. I was very shaken up (understandably, I think), and went to crying on a friend's shoulder. By the time the police got there, all of us had made up and were friends again. Even the director, who decided that maybe now was not the time to change the show!

Epilogue: The police determined after the tow truck lifted my poor car out of the gully, that the accident was a "no fault" accident. My right front tire had blown out because of a small piece of sharp metal which had punctured it. The officer also noted that had the car gone off the road where it 'should' have, right into the concrete underpass, we would have been killed. He said that either the driver was "A damn good driver, or damn lucky!" I would like to think the first, but am more inclined to believe the second...

May 09, 1995

Cold Feet

Ah, Shakertown. I think about it especially on these cold rainy winter days. Shakertown evokes memories of the smell of fresh cut grass, the heat of midsummer waiving up from the asphalt stage area, and the way the creek was absolutely irresistible one late summer night. We had been in rehearsal for 5 and 1/2 weeks without a break, and opening night was a mere 4 days away. No one wanted to go home after a particularly good rehearsal, and we sort of hung around chatting and relaxing on the warm grass outside the tent. The bugs were pretty bad there, what with the big halogen light mounted on the dressing room/storage building, so we decided to walk the half mile or so down to the little foot bridge over the Jasper river. It wasn't so much a river as a creek. It was maybe 6 feet wide, and not very deep, at least that's what we thought. To get there, you had to walk down the paved road a way, then you took the little dirt path into the cornfield which the local monks cared for. After a couple of minutes on the path, you could hear the gurgle and rush of the creek. Even the sound helped to make us feel cooler. We sat all in a line with our feet hanging over the edge of the bridge, not quite touching the water. After a while, one of the uh, less inhibited of our group (and none of us were terribly inhibited!) decided that he was just too hot to stand it any more, and decided to get in the creek. He got a long cornstalk left from last years crop from the creek bank, and poked around a bit to see how deep it was. It was only 3 feet deep near the bridge, so he lowered himself down. We were startled when he let out a loud yelp, but he assured us that it was just really cold. I figured that I certainly couldn't lose any more dignity being wet from the creek than I would being plastered with sweat, so I lowered myself to the water. Cold was hardly the word for what the water was. I don't know where the head of that stream was, but I'd swear it was run-off from a glacier! My body was covered with goose bumps, and my nipples felt like they were going to pop off my breasts. It was so cold that it hurt. Then I noticed that the bottom of the creek was covered with rocks that varied from the size of a football to the size of a basketball, and none of them were attached to anything. Every step I took increased my chances of falling. While I was tottering around trying to keep from falling, I discovered that the little meandering creek had a current which was running so fast that it was trying to sweep my feet out from under me. These three discoveries happened one right on top of the other, just after I had let go of the bridge rail. With these three conditions, it wasn't long before
1) my feet got numb from the cold,
2) the current swept my feet out from under me, and
3) I fell into the water over my head.
Now, the falling didn't bother me from the stand point of being in the water. I was a certified life-saver (no candy jokes, please), and a very strong swimmer. What bothered me was that I was so cold that the water was starting to feel warm, and I couldn't feel my feet. Well, that and the fact that the current had grabbed my t-shirt and was pulling me downstream, away from the bridge. Did I mention that the banks were vertical, and rose a good 3 feet over the top of the water? No chance of climbing them, especially with wet, frozen feet. So, I did the graceful, female thing, and screamed for help. Three pair of strong male arms reached out and lifted my freezing body out of the water. Call it sexism if you like, but I don't recall ever having felt anything so good as those three warm males holding me up out of the water and pulling me up on the bridge. They sat and held me with every one else looking on until I warmed up enough to walk. Barry (the fella who got in first) was kind of embarrassed I think, because he had to ask for help getting out, too. Quite a blow to his male ego I suppose. There should be a lesson in this story, but if there is, I never learned it. I am still a bit reckless, and completely unafraid to try something new. And yes, I still jump into creeks feet first, without looking!

January 01, 1996

The Twister

...and we all stumbled out of the oppressive heat of the tent, into the somewhat less oppressive heat of the shade of the tree. We had been rehearsing for less than an hour, but the heat and humidity were bad - the temp inside the tent had reached 135 during the full heat of the day, and had only creeped down to a not quite bearable 110 by the time we started rehearsal. It looked like we might have to give it up as a bad job and go inside. That was not a good thing. The only thing we could do inside was rehearse music, and we knew that already. It was the dances that we were still screwing up. After a bit of discussion, we decided that we would all just take it real slow, and sent the tech guy out for another cooler of Gatorade.

Take it slow we did, but at least it was practice. As we practiced the steps, we noticed that it was getting kind of dark in the tent. No one really thought anything about it - rehearsals started at 6, and it usually got dark about 9. The tech guy brought up the lights so we could continue rehearsal. Someone glanced at their watch, and announced that it was only 8:00, and why was it so dark? All the flaps of the tent were up and tied out of the way, so we moved over to the open sides of the tent and scanned the skies. We had been so intent upon our dance steps that we had failed to notice the ominous rolling clouds which had moved in to cover the sun. At just that moment, it started to rain. Huge, fat drops of rain splatting on everything. We all moved back into the tent. No big deal, we rehearsed in the rain several days every year. Hard not to, since May/June is the "rainy season" in Kentucky. We buried ourselves in the dance again. Then we all noticed that it had gotten considerably cooler, and much breezier in the tent. We looked around and up to see the roof of the tent billow upwards - not a sight one is used to seeing in a tent that size. Then the poles started levitating, and the tent got a mind of it's own. The entire tent was dancing. Each perimeter support pole began tapping to its own drummer. The center support pole was also jumping up and down. No small feat for a pole eight inches in diameter, and about thirty feet tall. We didn't know what to do. Most ran for the Centre House basement. A few tried to save some things. My friend Jon tried to get past one of the dancing poles to get his things out of the dressing room. He was rewarded for his effort when the rope holding the pole to the stake broke, and lashed around him like a whip, tearing his shirt and leaving him with an inch wide rope burn all the way around his body. The half finished set began to topple, sending more folks out to the Centre House. I was helping the tech guy try to salvage the lights. Lights are very expensive, and we were borrowing them from the University. I was at the control board, unplugging stuff like crazy when I heard a strange popping noise. I looked up just in time to shout a warning to the tech guy, who moved just enough to avoid being hit by a one and a half meter metal pipe with four 6"x9" lekos on board. That's a heavy pipe! The lenses in the lamps exploded when they hit the asphalt, and sent shards of glass over the entire dance floor. We reached a rapid and silent understanding that the last one out of the tent was a gibbering moron, and high-tailed it for the Centre House. As we reached the top of the little hill above the stage area, he grabbed my arm and turned me around. There, coming in our direction, was the tent. The whole thing. It was completely intact, and even the roof was still peaked. As we watched, it folded up on itself, tossing long wooden poles in every direction. I have to admit that I nearly wet myself. No joke. I ran like I have never run before or since. The tech guy stood another minute or two, watching the twister coming over us. I never saw it. Before it got to us I was deep in the blessed cool of the basement, back against the wall, panting like crazy. After a half hour or so, we dared to venture back outside. Everything was drenched, but the birds were singing, and the sun was peeking up over the horizon, saying good night to us. Kind of thumbing his imaginary nose at us. We finally found the tent over in the cornfield, completely destroyed. Those tents are sewn in strips - this one was white-yellow-white-yellow and so on. Was. When we found it, it was more a yellow and white patchwork. At the stage area, we found that the wind had pulled several of the metal stakes out of the asphalt, leaving gaping holes filled with water. The tree under which all this occurred (a grand old tree who's species I know not) had lost a few branches and a bunch of leaves. No other damage was ever found.

Apparently, tornados hate mobile homes and tents...

May, 1996

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